Art and Art Exhibitions: Year In Review 2010

Art exhibits in 2010 became more interactive, with curators emphasizing the relevance of the past to the present and artists enticing museumgoers to actively participate in the shows. Ai Weiwei encouraged viewers to walk on porcelain sunflower seeds, and Marina Abramovic invited viewers to sit across from her while she remained motionless. In the realm of photography, images were often posted to social networking Web sites, but the allure of vintage photographs remained strong.

Art

Art and Art ExhibitionsAndy Rain—EPA/LandovDespite continuing economic uncertainty in 2010, auction returns for contemporary art indicated new vitality in the market. At Sotheby’s, the February sale outstripped presales estimates and—with 96% of the 77 lots sold—became the second most successful of its type in the house’s history. New records were set for 19 artists, including Chris Ofili and Blinky Palermo; Yves Klein’s flame-resistant resin imprint F 88 (1961) and Willem de Kooning’s Untitled XIV (1983) brought the highest bids of the evening ($5.13 million and $6.2 million, respectively). Resurgence continued at Phillips de Pury and Company, although the showing was less spectacular, with solid sales that reached the midestimate figures and strongest returns for established figures such as Jean-Michel Basquiat and Donald Judd.

Contemporary art also led the Asian market, with mainland Chinese and Indonesian bidders dominating the Hong Kong spring sales. Sotheby’s brought in $18.7 million—$2 million above presales estimates—for contemporary art alone, setting new records for rising artists. Liu Ye’s acrylic Bright Road (1995), featuring a cherubic couple dancing as a flaming jet plummets to earth behind them, brought the highest price for a work by a contemporary Asian artist in two years, quickly ending last year’s speculation that the new Asian market had reached its peak.

Recovery was also seen in the Postwar and Modern markets. Alberto Giacometti’s 1.8-m (6-ft) bronze figure Walking Man I (1960) broke all previous records for a single work of art, selling at Sotheby’s for $104.3 million. That fee was quickly overtaken by the sale at Christie’s of Pablo Picasso’s Nude, Green Leaves, and Bust (1932) for $106.5 million. Also at Christie’s, a new record was set for Jasper Johns, one of whose iconic Flag (1960–66) paintings nearly doubled its high estimate when the bidding ended at $28.6 million. The market proved unpredictable, however, as seen at Christie’s Impressionist and Modern Art sale, promoted as the most valuable auction ever to take place in London. The sales—featuring works by Henri Matisse, René Magritte, and Gustav Klimt—were solid but lacklustre. Picasso’s “Blue Period” portrait of Ángel Fernández de Soto (1903) sold at its low-end estimate, and Claude Monet’s superb 1906 Nymphéas was retracted when bids failed to reach the low estimate of $44 million.

The most innovative of the year’s new works explored the idea of synthesis, blurring boundaries between the dictates of site and transformative intervention. Flare II, a sculpture by Antony Gormley, was directly inspired by the space he selected for installation: the void defined by Christopher Wren’s 17th-century Geometric Staircase in the southwest tower of London’s St. Paul’s Cathedral. Seeking to “construct an energy field describing a human space in space,” Gormley buoyed a human form within wire-mesh clouds constructed along the orthogonal lines generated by the body’s mass. In this way, he countered gravity with geometry, generating form from the convex surface of the interposed body suspended in Wren’s concave space. Cy Twombly also intervened in a centuries-old space: the Salle des Bronzes in the Paris Louvre. He transformed the 400-sq-m (4,300-sq-ft) ceiling into a magnificent cerulean blue canopy spangled with discus-shaped forms and white panels inscribed with the names of ancient Greek sculptors as a harmonious tribute to the Greek and Roman sculptures displayed in the gallery.

Anglo-Nigerian artist Yinka Shonibare employed site to reconsider historical significance and issues of identity in his installation for the Fourth Plinth in London’s Trafalgar Square. Nelson’s Ship in a Bottle featured a 1:30 replica of the HMS Victory enclosed in a giant Perspex bottle corked and sealed with red wax. Negotiating the provocative convergence of commemoration and critique, Shonibare altered only one detail of the ship commanded by Sir Horatio Nelson in the Battle of Trafalgar; he used colourful African textiles for the 31 rigged sails to acknowledge “the multicultural society we have in Britain today” as well as the “historic victory.” German artist Thomas Demand blurred the boundaries between inspiration and invention, as well as artist and curator, by organizing a group exhibition (including his own work) at the Villa Paloma for the Musée National de Monaco in Monte Carlo. He used the title of René Magritte’s eclectic journal (briefly published in the early 1950s) as a departure point, not in tribute but in a desire to controvert historic categories. Referring to Magritte’s famous painting of a pipe that states “Ceci n’est pas une pipe,” Demand said with a touch of irony, “I am not Magritte.” Irony was present too in the Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall, where Chinese artist Ai Weiwei encouraged visitors to defy conventional museum restrictions and walk on his installation of more than 100 million handmade and painted life-size porcelain Sunflower Seeds. Fearing that inhalation of the resulting ceramic dust would prove harmful, however, the Tate (with the artist’s support) subsequently closed direct access to the gallery and directed the public to view the work from a walkway above.

The way in which Bravo TV’s reality show Work of Art: The Next Great Artist, featuring 14 artists competing for $100,000 and an exhibition at the Brooklyn (N.Y.) Museum, breached the line between art and entertainment stirred critical controversy, but on-air judge-critic Jerry Saltz noted that it gave rise to a kind of “accidental art criticism,” encouraging popular interest in contemporary art. Abdi Farah won the competition. Banksy’s film Exit Through the Gift Shop, purportedly a documentary about street art by an amateur filmmaker whose enthusiasm leads him to adopt a covert identity as a graffiti artist called Mr. Brainwash, mocked the genre with the tagline “The incredible true story of how the greatest graffiti film of all time was never made.” Critic Jeannette Catsoulis labeled it a “prankumentary.”

Each in their own way, the artists selected for the short list of the 26th Turner Prize defied expectations. As the only painter on the list, Dexter Dalwood worked in a sharp, Neorealist style, but his disturbing scenes of murder and conspiracy confounded the viewer’s desire to ascertain narrative. Angela de la Cruz exploited the three-dimensional possibilities of canvas by folding and layering monochromatic planes into sculptural shapes. The film collaborative Otolith Group (Anjalika Sagar and Kodwo Eshun)—named for the human inner-ear structure that establishes the physical perception of gravity—challenged the documentary genre with time-traveling films that blurred past, future, and present. The ultimate winner was Susan Philipsz, who sampled familiar songs and sounds, often in her own voice. She subverted the ambient noise of bridges and walkways with hidden sound tracks that triggered personal, as well as communal, memories.

Three visual artists were chosen as John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation fellows: traditional stone carver Nicholas Benson, whose immaculate inscriptions graced public buildings and monuments; Jorge Pardo, who used quotidian objects to create mind-altering, large-scale installations; and sculptor Elizabeth Turk, whose technique coaxed out a weightless quality in marble. At age 95, Cuban-born painter Carmen Herrera received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Cintas Foundation for her elegant geometric abstractions. The Ordway Prize, granted every other year to a curator or critic and to a visual artist went to Hamza Walker, director of education and associate curator at the University of Chicago’s Renaissance Society, and Artur Zmijewski, a Polish artist who moved freely between sculpture, film, and photography. The French government made Italian-born American curator Francesco Bonami a member of the Legion of Honour, and painter Frank Stella was honoured in the United States with the National Medal of Arts.

Notable deaths in the art world included painters Sigmar Polke, Wu Guanzhong, and Kenneth Noland; sculptor Louise Bourgeois; and Corneille, a founder of the group known as COBRA. Other losses included painters Ruth Kligman, David Slivka, self-taught artist Purvis Young, and the Togolese artist Paul Ahyi, who designed Togo’s national flag, and sculptor Dustin Shuler.

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